Neural regions underlying object and action naming: Complementary evidence from acute stroke and primary progressive aphasia.
Bonnie L Breining, Andreia V Faria, Brian Caffo and 5 others
PMID 35832655WHAT IT FOUND
Some people with primary progressive aphasia or acute stroke name actions poorly while naming objects normally, and others show the opposite.
Adding a 30-item action naming test to object naming can reveal deficits a standard object test misses.
Key findings
01Object and action naming were doubly dissociated: 18 people with PPA and 5 with acute stroke had impaired object naming but intact action naming, while 5 with PPA and 1 with acute stroke had impaired action naming but intact object naming.
02Action naming impairment was common: 89 of 138 with PPA and 11 of 37 with acute stroke scored impaired on the HANA.
03The brain regions linked to naming were not shared across causes: none of the eight object naming regions and none of the seven action naming regions were identified in both acute stroke and PPA.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
No treatment outcomes were reported. Action pictures also contain objects, so a person with object processing problems can look impaired on action naming even when the action naming itself is intact. Static pictures cannot fully capture actions that unfold over time, which may reduce the accuracy of action naming assessment. PPA and stroke were analysed with different brain measures, so the two causes could not be compared directly in one model. The imaging analysis used only 31 PPA and 37 stroke participants, and the LASSO method may overfit or drop correlated regions, so unselected regions are not proven unimportant. Normal cut-offs came from 26 controls, and controls found object naming easier than action naming, with the normal BNT cut-off 4 items higher than the HANA cut-off, which can affect how dissociations are classified. Only PPA and acute left hemisphere ischemic stroke were compared, so the findings do not show what happens with other causes of aphasia or right hemisphere stroke.
Declared interests
The authors declared no conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read the double dissociation as proof that action naming is always harder than object naming or that the listed brain regions are proven causes. Some participants named actions better than objects, and the imaging findings were associations in small subsets with possible missed regions.